Tourist at The Palazzo Maffei Tried to Sit in a Priceless Chair Covered in Swarovski Crystals and Shattered it to Pieces

Dexerto – A tourist visiting the Palazzo Maffei museum in Verona has damaged a Swarovski crystal-covered sculpture modeled after Vincent van Gogh’s famous “Chair” painting.

The incident, which took place in April but surfaced publicly on June 16, was captured on CCTV. Footage shows a couple posing for a photo in front of Nicola Bolla’s artwork, titled Van Gogh’s Chair, when the man sits on the fragile piece, causing it to collapse. He then steadies himself against a wall before walking away. Museum staff were not present in the room at the time.

The sculpture, created in 2008, was constructed from metal and aluminum and covered with thousands of Swarovski crystals. It was part of a solo exhibition dedicated to Bolla’s work, presented alongside modern and contemporary art in the museum’s collection.

"Oh I'm sorry, how crazy of me to expect a 'priceless' chair to have the slightest bit of structural integrity."

With all due respect to Nicola Bolla, the artist whose brilliant chair covered in Swavorski crystals was crushed by a disrespectful tourist, your chair sucks. It's bad art.

I'm no art snob. Honestly, I don't know the first thing about art. Oftentimes, I'm not even sure what art is anymore. Sometimes it's a guy taping a banana to a wall and selling it for $120,000.

Other times it's a man swindling some idiot into forking over $18,000 for his "invisible sculpture".

Or sometimes it's Banksy, who I'm pretty sure is just a group of friends scamming the world into buying the same 'Balloon Girl' stencil painting for hundreds of thousands of dollars over and over and over again.

And when the Banksy guys are feeling really cocky, after convincing some sucker to cough up $1.4 million for one of their Balloon Girl's at auction, they destroy it right in their face. Which somehow only increases the painting's value by 1,814%. 

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That's how I know this Nicola Bolla guy isn't a serious artist. For starters, his art doesn't even come with a convoluted explanation that convinces people his extremely simple creation is actually worth 10,000x more than what any logical person would conclude. All Nicola Bolla managed to do was rip off some old Vincent Van Gogh still life of a chair.

Eileen Tweedy. Shutterstock Images.

Then build a completely unusable version of it and cover the thing with expensive jewels. He more or less just taped money to an object so that it looked expensive and threw a "priceless" tag on it. That's not priceless. That's the opposite of priceless. I can run down to a Kay Jewelers right now and find a frail old man with a tiny little magnifying glass who will tell me exactly what his bedazzled chair is worth. 

And the minute some tourist has the audacity to try and sit in his fancy chair, exposing Nicola for his shoddy carpentry, the Palazzo Maffei museum goes into a whole embarrassing tirade about how art deserves more respect.

Dexerto – Palazzo Maffei described the incident as a “nightmare,” stating that the couple ignored “every rule of respect for art and culture.” The museum reported the damage to local police and launched a restoration effort to repair the sculpture. The artwork has since been restored and returned to display.

“For days we didn’t know if it would be possible to restore it. But we did it. We are sharing this episode not only for the record, but to start a real awareness campaign on the value of art and the respect it deserves.

“A heartfelt thanks goes to the police, our security department and the restorers, whose precious work allowed the work to be recovered […] Because art is not just to be seen. It is to be loved. It is to be protected.”

You think the Banksy guys would have filled their diapers over one of their "priceless" works of art being squashed by a tourist? Of course not. They would have left the chair sitting there broken to pieces, then released a statement explaining how their bejeweled chair being crushed by a fat tourist symbolizes…. something… idk I'm not the art guy here. But I know a good artist would have found a way to turn this situation around, and auction off their broken chair for 1000x more money than it was originally worth. Not dump a bunch of money into restoring a chair that never held weight in the first place.